The whole room holds the model

Ben Swift · 6 August 2026

The search sheets are the cutouts activity with the cutting taken out, and they scale to a room. The CLI shuffles a corpus and deals it round-robin into one page per participant, so no two sheets are the same. You call out the last token written on the board, everyone scans their own sheet for it, and hands go up wherever there’s a match. Pick one of those hands at random and you have your next token.

Every token pair in the text was dealt to exactly one person, and the deal spreads each context across as many people as it will go. A continuation that happens six times puts six hands in the air; a rare one puts up two. The show of hands is the probability distribution, without anybody counting anything. Pick at random, though. Take whoever shouts first and you’re sampling the fastest reader instead of the text.

Nobody holds the whole model. No single sheet can continue the text on its own; the model only exists across the whole room, and if somebody is away, some contexts draw no hands at all.

Four sets are ready to print: Green Eggs and Ham at 15 sheets, Peter Rabbit at 17, The Cat in the Hat at 36 (A5 sheets two-up on A4), and Australia at 79. Print them single-sided and hand out one each. The first page is the briefing for whoever is running it, and every page after that is a different participant’s sheet. Every sheet carries the same number of token pairs, so the length of the text decides how many sheets there are, and a set only suits a group of about that size. The tools page will build a set from any text you paste in.

Building these turned up a problem with the generated colour palette. Sheets set their token pairs at 16pt rather than the cutouts’ 36pt, and at that size, colours the metric called comfortably distinct kept reading as the same colour. Max-min OKLab ΔE counts a lightness step the same as a hue step; a scanning eye doesn’t. On a small glyph, a lightness step just reads as that colour again, darker.

Fixing it meant asking a different question. A free search for maximally distinct colours gets named afterwards, by hand, which is how the palette ended up needing words like ochre and wine — chosen because they were the nearest available, not because a room would reach for them. But the name is the whole point: “who has cat? it’s a green one” only works if the room agrees on which swatch green means. So the words come first now. Every swatch is pinned to a colour word’s centroid in the xkcd colour survey — a couple of hundred thousand people naming colours free-form, which is the best evidence there is for what a colour word means — and the search picks the words whose printable colours sit furthest apart.

That lands on eight: black, grey, red, brown, green, blue, purple, magenta. Six print at their survey centroid exactly; only grey and green move, and only far enough to stay legible on paper.¹ The cutouts use the same eight now. Thirty colours at 36pt was more than anyone can hold at once, and a colour nobody can name is a filter nobody can call out.

Eight is close to the ceiling, too. The obvious ninth is orange, and a printable orange sits ΔE 0.074–0.101 from red once it has been through a CMYK profile — you can have orange or red, not both. Green and turquoise collide the same way, as do magenta and pink.

The key prints on the brief, on both the sheets and the cutouts. Call “who has cat? it’s a green one” from the front and the room narrows its search before anyone reads a token.